Wednesday, September 26, 2012

The Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh was 80
yesterday. He is the second oldest Prime Minister the country has had. Morarji
Desai was the oldest. He became Prime Minister in 1977 at 81 and left office at
83 two years later.

2. Dr. Manmohan Singh took over as the PM when he
was 72.He would be 82 if he continues in office till 2014.Shri Atal Behari
Vajpayee took over as the Prime Minister when he was 74 and left office at 80
after the defeat of his party in the elections of 2004. If the BJP had been
returned to power in the 2004 elections, he might have continued as the PM till
the age of 85.

3.Rajiv Gandhi was the youngest Prime Minister in
the history of independent India. He became Prime Minister when he was 40 and
left office at 45 after his Congress Party lost the elections of 1989. His
mother Indira Gandhi was the second youngest Prime Minister in the history of
independent India. She became the PM at the age of 49 and was assassinated when
she was 67 in 1984. For three years between 1977 and 1980, she was in political
wilderness. The remaining years between 1966 and 1984, she was in office as the
Prime Minister. The other Prime Ministers of India were in office between 50
and 70 years of age.

4. Till 1991, when Narasimha Rao, on being sworn in
as the Prime Minister, inducted Dr.Manmohan Singh as the Finance Minister, he
had served as a bureaucrat and not as a politician. He joined the Congress
after taking over as the Finance Minister in 1991. He enjoyed the total trust
of Rao and was totally loyal to Rao.

5.Rao gave him a free hand to re-shape the economy
and he performed the task creditably. His success as the Finance Minister
between 1991 and 1996 was due to the fact that he and Rao were on the same wave-length
on the need for liberalising and modernising the economy. He did not have to
hold any important post in the party in order to be successful as the Finance
Minister.

6. When he took over as the Prime Minister in 2004
at the request of Mrs.Sonia Gandhi, Dr.Manmohan Singh faced many handicaps due
to the fact that he had never held any post in the party and people like Shri
Pranab Mukherjee under whom he had worked as a bureaucrat were now required to
work under him as the Prime Minister. Initially, this created uneasy personal
equations but he managed to get over them. Another major difficulty faced by
him arose from the fact that the primary loyalty of the Ministers from the
Congress in his Council of Ministers was to Mrs.Sonia Gandhi and not to him.
There was and there still is no Minister whose primary loyalty is to
Dr.Manmohan Singh.

7. During his first tenure as the Prime Minister, the
country faced some major internal security problems. The Maoist insurgents
spread their area of operations over large tracts of Central India. There was a
major act of mass casualty terrorism carried out by Pakistan-sponsored jihadi
terrorists in the suburban trains of Mumbai in July 2006. There were many acts
of jihadi terrorism by the Indian Mujahideen in different cities of India in
2007 and 2008. There was a three-day commando-style attack on different targets
in Mumbai between November 26 and 29,2008, by sea-borne terrorists of the
Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET).

8. Despite the deterioration in the internal
security situation during his first tenure in the rest of India, the situation in
Jammu and Kashmir registered a qualitative improvement with new ideas for
finding a solution to the Kashmir problem with Pakistan being discussed with
positive results through back channels with the regime of Gen.Pervez Musharraf
in Pakistan. If the terrorism situation in Punjab improved and normalcy was restored
when Narasimha Rao was the Prime Minister, the situation in J&K improved
under Dr.Manmohan Singh for which credit has to be given to him.

9. Under the management of Shri P.Chidambaram as
the Finance Minister, the economy registered considerable improvement and India
was taken as seriously as China in the economic decision-making circles of the
world. Dr. Manmohan Singh along with President Hu Jintao of China was invited
to the head table in all economic summits. Chindia became a much used
expression in characterising the economic race between India and China.

10. Foreign policy was another major area of
success between 2004 and 2009, with India and the US coming closer together and
with India’s relations with China showing improvement despite the suspicions
caused in Bejing by the Indo-US strategic partnership and the initiatives taken
by the Manmohan Singh Government forimproving relations with Singapore, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea and
Australia.

11. During this period, Dr.Manmohan Singh was only
Prime Minister by half with much of political authority and prominence
remaining in the hands of Mrs.Sonia Gandhi. Despite this, his visible and
palpable record was positive.

12. At the same time, a huge iceberg of corruption,
nepotism, crony governance and favouritism was gathering shape and strength
under his administration. His reluctance and inability to control the Ministers
from the coalition partners under the pretext of coalition dharma or coalition
compulsions contributed to the formation of this iceberg. The tip of this
iceberg was seen in 2010 in the so-called Radia tapes which brought out the
enormous political influence that an apparently mediocre person had been able
to acquire over the decision and opinion-making process by taking advantage of
the permissive atmosphere that prevailed. The iceberg hit the Government in
2011---with one scam after another, with one irregularity after another and
with one wrong-doing after another denting the credibility of the Prime
Minister.

13.But even before the iceberg hit the Indian ship,
one could see the gathering storm and darkening clouds from different
directions. The shifting of Shri Chidambaram from the Finance Ministry to the
Home Ministry after the 26/11 terrorist strikes improved our internal security
management, but considerably weakened our economic management. This weakening
of the economic management took place at a time of the global economic
melt-down. India came to be seen less and less as a success story and more and
more as a stalling economy. References to Chindia disappeared from debates in
international financial circles.

14. The crisis and the drift called for strong
leadership that came to be missing. The duality of control between Mrs.Sonia
Gandhi and the Prime Minister added to the gravity of the drift. Instead of
admitting the gravity of the iceberg that had hit the State and his Government
and trying to bring the ship back under control, Dr.Manmohan Singh and his
Ministers tried to deny the presence of the iceberg.

15. Only now, there has been a belated realisation
that India is adrift and needs a strong and decisive leadership to bring it
back on the route of progress and development. One has to welcome the hard
economic decisions already taken by the Government and the support that the
Prime Minister has received from his party for those decisions. As I had
pointed out in an earlier article, this is only the beginning. More hard
decisions are required not only in the field of economy, but also in respect of
administrative reforms to deal with corruption and to improve further the
national securitymachinery.

16. It is time for the Prime Minister to convince
the people that those decisions will be forthcoming and will be implemented
even if they lead to early elections and the possibility of a defeat for his
party. Dr.Manmohan Singh has less than two years left in office. He can still
salvage his reputation and that of his Government and party by doing all that
needs to be done to restore the confidence of the people.

17. The need of the hour is not only for better
leadership and governance, but also for a greater role for GenNext in policy
and decision making and implementation. It is a time of transition from the old
to the young. The transition should be expedited and not delayed. ( 27-9-12)